History

This story, like many, begins in a front of a small PC in the front room of a modest home in a non-descript suburb. I say non-descript because while today it is somewhat popular, then it was the back end of a humble town.

A boy of perhaps 10 sits at the PC and is working at learning the ins and outs of a programming language. His world is a simple one: school, raising pets, family, household jobs, few friends, bullying, isolation, confusion. The PC is a refuge of order, predictability in a chaotic hurtful world. An unquestioning ally who challenges only a lack of logic, an error in syntax.

By 16 the scene is largely unchanged. The boy is more gangly, no less confused, no more in receipt of the guidance that would impart clarity, because in large part his elders are as ignorant as he. The world is, as they say, a big and scary place.

It’s to this boy that I glance when I, as a middle-aged man, see the unfolding mise en scene of the contemporary US. But while many are fixated on the precursors to National Socialism and fitting comparisons to Trump, it’s to the radicalised youth I find myself looking, and wondering how many are the same child, in the same dark world, but for whom fascism is a light, a magnet, acting upon their needs.

Consider for a moment the faces of the young men we’re seeing on our screens, but removed from the awfulness of their ideology. Richard Spencer just prior to being punched for the second time on that day, happy at being asked about the frog on his lapel.

The unnamed guy, still wearing his school backpack and Totenkopf hat, feeling like a tough guy.

Alexandre Bissonette.

Each of these men are nerds. Willowy weaklings. They sport none of the hallmarks of masculinity; musculature, fulsome beards, strong jaws. They are virgins of the sort to deride without irony inaccessible women – which by definition is near-all women – as femnazis. They are the sorts to have been the denizens of libraries and chess clubs, to have played Warhammer or DnD. They are Oedipal time bombs, a cliché of gender and control confusion.

And they are my people.

I have a macabre fascination with the radicalisation of these youths, and the path they have taken, because in the years of my own confusion I may well have been coaxed to the same path. My fascination in part rests on the realisation that these fools are only foot soldiers needing to be fought on the way to the real bosses, but also in the transformation of fascism from a street-fighting creed beloved of morons to a hastily-typed, poorly-spelled ocean of comments on bulletin boards. And further, that in light of Spencer’s attempt to foment a pogrom, and Bissonette’s massacre, that behind these words is a growing likelihood of action.

It’s that willingness to spring to action that is the real transformation in C21st fascism. We can debate endlessly concern on suppressing free/hate speech, and the contrary risk that inaction leads to the harm of innocents – witness the pearl-clutching associated with punching Spencer and the lack of a thread joined to Bissonette, a customer of hate speech who needed sense slapped into him a long time ago.

While online radicalisation continues unabated in an environment of easy access to guns there is the omnipresent threat of more lives being lost. Lives lost among people who have done little more than to offend the sensibilities of radicals by simply being: being something readily and easily characterised as offensive via a closed logical circuit of spittle-laden invective.

This change is concerning and confusing because the apparent underlying motivation, being a poorly socialised nerd, has never been easier. The culture in which that younger me invested himself is now ubiquitous. Console games are a must-have icon for young men of all walks (let alone women), and geekery has never been more in demand. Dotcom and gadget billionaires are the darlings of all-too-many political elites. Nerds are smexy. So from where does this hatred well?

If I learned anything in those days of long ago it’s that confirmation bias is a powerful influence. Back when Huntington published his essay on the ‘clash of civilisations’ we liberals argued as strongly as possible that to give substance to that foolishness was to merely fuel to the bonfire of the military. Then the concern was that the US would look to China as the great threat, and force an ideological stand-off in justification of military pork-barrels.

Little did we know then that the real bugbear would become Islam. So each year since 2001 I’ve watched the echo-chamber grow in volume, with voices of all sorts joining the clamour to condemn aliens and self-confirm their own fears. Today in 2017 I see people I consider rational proclaiming loudly a conspiracy by Islam and “international financiers” – read “Jews” – to overwhelm the West. We are past the wondering and worrying, and find ourselves watching to a shadow-play of action and reaction.

It’s into this maelstrom of misinformation, fear and exploitation that is see my weaklings fall. Small men of the sorts who could not defend themselves in a brawl. Men for whom there can only ever be strength in numbers, or arms. Protected by the rhetorical shield of an ideology belonging to what was once the strongest nation on Earth, they are now closing ranks against a paper tiger.

And I wonder, what next? If the Coalition of the Frightened succeeds and the rhizome of fascism spreads within our own state will my weaklings be safe? Will they be able to hide behind their rhetoric and screens? Or will the real brutes assume the mantle?

Having more than a passing interest in history this book jumped out at me as part of a peruse of the interweb. Meso-American and Andean cultures seem to be something many people are interested in, but finding books that move past the usual tropes are hard to find.

Mann really lifts the game in relation to enabling greater understanding of what the Americas were like before European intrusion, primarily by addressing the greater myths and demolishing them in order. The concern with this type of book is that the mythbusting can sometimes stray far too close to explanations that end in “because aliens”. For example, “how could nomadic, semi-conscious tribes build the step pyramids?” Answer – aliens did it.

1491 uses the latest research to demonstrate that the Americas were home to a succession of advanced urban civilisations, demolishes the “population by land-bridge” argument, undermines the “Western wilderness” fallacy, and brings a detailed, but not obsessively undue amount of attention to the scale and number of cultures displaced by Europeans.

I came to The Iron Heel from a list of “Dystopian Fiction” I found on the interweb, a list also including such classics as 1984 and A Handmaiden’s Tale. It was interesting then to later discover that The Iron Heel is cited as an influence on Orwell, because the similarity in the authoritarian nations that emerge in London’s alternate-history USA and the industrialised world of Oceania is obvious, despite the two authorities being respectively Fascist and Communist.

The similarity in the nature of the authoritarianism depicted by London and Orwell reinforces for me the ease with which any imaginer can foresee their own system of government slipping into a future distinguished most strongly by control, with the machinery of this control only differentiated by favoured contemporary political philosophies. The potential to garner authority (and its exercise by an oligarchy or plutocracy) imagined by these authors is also exhibited the recently-read Paul Auster, In the Country of Last Things (1987).

Of course, it is nothing new to claim that all dystopia are marked by authority-masquerading-as-utopia. What is interesting to me is the manner in which dystopia is so readily imagined to emerge as a consequence of contemporary events, and the suggestion that the here and now may, by virtue of being the opposite of that dreaded future, in fact be the utopia we have long sought. This is especially the case when reading other contemporary fiction such as Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003, which I’m currently in the middle of) and by Marcel Theroux, Far North (2009), where the marvels of the C20th and early C21st are remembered as halcyon days.

The placement of utopia in the here and now, instead of placing it as a future to serve in contrast to a dystopia we need fear, a heaven and hell, is an idea in which I have become increasingly interested. In a manner of speaking, we do currently live in London’s “wonder-city of Asgard”, and our capitalists do operate an oligarchy in which a great many wonders are possible. It was strange therefore to be reading The Iron Heel as the Occupy Movement began to unfold across the US, and to see the authorities in Oakland begin to come down on protest. Part of me wondered if what London calls ‘standing on faces’ might not have continued and expanded had there been a different President in the White House.

While The Iron Heel degrades into a fantasy of class-, or caste-based warfare, the initial exposition of the failures of capitalism are very interesting, presenting as they do a critique of an economy in which monopoly and resource exploitation are rife, and in which competition to smother smaller players is both necessary and acceptable. While reading of absorption of the petite bourgeoisie by the corporations I was easily able to see the expansion of the mega-malls across the US, and the migration of the small-business-owner into minimum-wage jobs, and in the transformation of farmers to serfs I was reminded of the growth of gigantic monoculture industrial farming.

So does this mean that I think the US is slipping into authoritarianism, with London writing a vague script to a gathering revolution? No more than I think 1984 is likely. As it is The Iron Heel sits alongside the great dystopian works as a reminder of the paths on which no rational humanist would want to find themself. Moreover, what The Iron Heel and 1984 have in common is an imagined world in which resource-exploitation continues to be feasible. If you contrast those worlds to more recent works such as the aforementioned Oryx and Crake, Far North, or even Bruce Sterling The Caryatids (2009), all of which feature the collapse of the nation-state system under stress from resource shortages and environmental change, things start to get a little more real.

They say that to end a tale you need start from the beginning, but it was never going to be like that with me. And so it is that we’ve wandered to and fro, meandering through the many years of lives that have flowed together to make up the foundations of mine. But they say to know a man you must walk a mile in his shoes, no?

That said, this story was never truly about me, only mine for the retelling. Many many nights spent sitting up embracing the past, unpicking its fibrous strands and laying them open to the sunlight, waiting for the new growth to fill out and refresh a torrid history. In truth this tale was always hers, and needing explication it has sat festering indoors for all too long.

It’s just a pity that I couldn’t have explained it in detail, from start to finish. Or perhaps that I was just a better writer…

And so we have a woman alone with three children. One partner is deceased, another too violent and long since fled to Australia where he will hide in the desert for 40 years, and a third trapped in his home country.

That is the final chapter of this long winding stream of thought. My stepfather didn’t return with us from Greece after we had travelled there to settle in ’78, and so it was that we were in effect stranded between two places, my mother wanting to be there but unable to return. The specific details of this are stranded behind 30 years of retelling and hence difficult to know exactly. But, as I should have said many times before, this tale belongs to others, but is intermediated by its effect on a small boy.

In essence, we had taken a family friend with us to Greece. A friend who was, to all intents and purposes, a thief. I remember clearly my middle brother encouraged by him and to climb into the trees of a local peasant and steal her citrus. He stood by the roadside behind a stone fence and kept watch, while my brother and I scampered up into the branches to take oranges. I remember the arid landscape and the deepest blue of the Aegean skies. The white chalk cliffs and whitewashed buildings.

It was this friend who was the reason we left Greece and had to leave Yannis behind. Jeff, the thief, had been returning (wasted) from somewhere one evening and attempted to steal the donation box from the front of the local orthodox church. This was of course in plain sight of the local taverna, the patrons of which were sitting outside eating and drinking, and who promptly had him arrested and thrown in jail. You should know of course that “Greek jail” in the 1970s was of course a byword for squalor, the kind of place a country boy from New Zealand shouldn’t really find himself.

And that, as they say, was that. We were despatched home to New Zealand, our brief hiatus in the idyll ended, and Yannis stayed in Greece to help Jeff out of jail. The fool.

Setting out on this journey I was not intending to uncover half of the information I have. The intent was always instead to provide an exploration of how and why people arrive where they are, an examination of the depth of history that lie within the events people judge one another for. And to a degree I think I have succeeded.

But that is not to say that this tale is ended! Not yet. There is still our small boy in a field, lost, holding the horseshoe nail of history, a small thing upon which great events turn.

It is the end of the line for my father though. I’ve stated many times that he was sick, his body wracked and ruined. He has withdrawn from society, and rants at his carers about ‘the system’, ‘parental authority’, and other symbols of control. He is within the counter-culture, but not of it, for the cynic in me sees the counter-culture as yet another aspect of the status-quo, a mere playground for the leaders of my own adulthood, an exercise in rhetoric for a nascent baby boomer political front. And so he becomes a foot soldier, expendable.

I wonder if he turned back to his Catholicism in those last few days? For his mother his death was a object upon which she hung a renewed faith, and a reason to seek solace in the church. Though being much like his mother, what Howard felt in those last few days is a mystery.

We know that he took to travelling by rail, and that he spent several stints either at the attention of the police and in Oakley Hospital, but that is all. Records from this time are extremely limited, and the only letter I have read is Howard making a request to come and stay with my aunt on the East Coast, which I have mentioned.

And so it is that he is discovered in September of 1972, long deceased, beneath a tree in the Auckland domain. A passer by finds the body, and reports it to those same authorities, who collect it and begin an investigation. It seems that he had spent his last night in a doss house somewhere downtown, and it was there that he passed. He must have had companions, because they removed his body from the city, alive or dead, and in some ritual, laid him to rest at the base of a tree.

Again, I often wonder about his Catholicism in those last moments. I wonder if He at last called for you Old Boy? Did he at last lift you from the arms of Magdalene, to embrace you, to comfort you? To wash away the sins of a petty rebellion, the wounds you made to smother pain? Did he lift you from the speckled shadows, and raise you at last into the light? Did he lay you upon his lap as Mary laid the Christ upon hers, prostrate? Did he call for you at last, Allehlujah, my child come home?

I hope you too saw beyond the veil Old Boy, and found that world of peace.

We can each of us look backward to a snapshot of who we were at a moment of our own personal history. We can see what it was that made us who we were by looking at the tangled skein that wove us into the tapestry of which I’ve spoken. But at the time, while we each pull together the strands of daily life it is impossible to know the patterns we weave.

So naturally this was the way of it for my mother. My father having abandoned her after 3 days of trying to make happy family, his own daemons continuing to harry him, she moved out of the house she had been sharing with my aunt, and began to seek her own way. I was the cute appendage to her new life.

It was then that she took up with my middle brother’s father, Eddie, and following closely in her own mother’s footsteps was quickly pregnant to a man who could care for her.

She speaks of him being a delivery driver, which implies he took her on the road, and suggests his mischievousness was a key part of her attraction to him.

How their relationship formed I’ve never known. Eddie was also absent from my life from about age 4, Liz having escaped the East Coast and travelled to the Bay of Plenty to stay with my uncle. But like all the men in her life prior to our settling in Mount Maunganui he left a strong impression and child before their paths parted permanently.

It is again strange in retrospect how quickly all this took place. In what I now consider the blink of an eye my mother has left home, borne two children, experienced untold difficulties, and travelled across the breadth of the North Island. A whirlwind is all you could call it, with Eddie being just one more vortex into which she fell.

I’ve only met the man twice in my memory. Once at my brother’s wedding in 2004, and once after he came back to New Zealand briefly. Consequently there is no strong association between us. Had we stayed with him for longer in my childhood he may have made an impression, but the flight to the Bay of Plenty ended the possibility of that.

And why? Alcohol and alcoholism runs strongly in his family. What I’m uncertain of is whether he took to the drink before or after the death of his own mother, tragically taken in a car accident around the time of my brother’s birth, and with the drink came a violence, and an apparent meanness.

I learned that he beat her long after I had become an adult. She tells of holding my brother, an infant, while he laid into her, she thinking that the presence of the child would prevent what befell her.

How badly she was beaten I don’t know, and likely never will. What I do know is that she took a step not many women in the 1970s, or the 1980s for that matter, did and left him. And for that I can only commend her. Growing up with an alcoholic is one of those contributing factors you hear people speak of when making excuses for their present, and it is one I and my brother was best well away from.

And so it was that it was her and I, alone again, my little brother a joy to us both.

How my father fell completely out of society remains much of a mystery to this day. After his departure from Tokomaru Bay in what must have been very early ’72 he appears to have returned to Auckland and continued to seek help with his illness, but in a society completely unprepared for the type of rehabilitation he required.

New Zealand in the early ’70s was, like many of its contemporaries, still uncertain whether drug addiction was a health or criminal issue, and from what records I’ve been able to secure it was to the attention of both these types of authority that my father was brought. You can imagine then the shame of his parents, your stereotypical hard-working suburban family, who found itself in possession of a son unable to pull himself together.

My earliest inquiry into the period between the East Coast and his death resulted in an interesting titbit of information that has taken a number of years to slot into meaning. Some time in mid-to-late ’72 the mother of a friend of Howard’s came home to find him sitting on the couch in her lounge. Surprised to find him there, she did not give him a particularly warm welcome (as you would expect), and he left, in what I myself see as another incident of running away.

I always interpreted this encounter as a plea for help, and more recent discoveries in official documents have confirmed this for me. Howard apparently got on well with his friend’s mum, and it was probably to her that he was attempting to turn, in an effort to find some sort of comfort the rebellion against my grandparents precluded.

It is a pattern I have seen several times among personal contacts with heavy drug dependence, a spiral downwards into increasingly anti-social behaviour while also clinging desperately to the normality and safety of society itself. For many this hypocrisy strikes very deeply, and is key to their inability to ‘pull themself together’; a counter-veiling force acting to distance them from the ones they love, while simultaneously increasing the yearning for succour. And so their psyche sheers, often irreparably.

For this reason I now know what he must have been experiencing when taken off a train in Putaruru in May 1972. He is wandering the North Island, seeking who knows what, perhaps Jerusalem and Baxter who has helped others, perhaps nothing more than comfort in the distance from home. He is drunk and in a ritalin stupour, so the guards remove him and hand him to the police. The police in turn hand him to Tokanui Mental Hospital, and it is there than another chapter of his rehabilitation begins, in a place many now speak of with hushed tones. He is sick, covered in tracks, emaciated, alone, lost. A specimen under a benevolent gaze.